Solitary Confinement
by deervelvet
Summary: Allelujah, for as much of his life that he could remember, had not been alone, and so the silence in his own mind was the first thing he noticed upon waking. (Post-Operation Fallen Angels oneshot. Fairly graphic medical descriptions and mental distress.)


Allelujah had never been alone with his thoughts.

Perhaps the Kazakh boy born to parents who either couldn't afford to raise him or who couldn't manage to survive had known what it was to be lost inside one's own head. Perhaps he'd had the pleasure of daydreaming for an audience of no one but himself. Perhaps he'd known how it felt to be sure that each thought, each bit of rationale, each motive, each decision, each opinion was his own. They belonged to that boy and that boy alone. Perhaps, even, he had known that inward was a reliable destination to which he could turn to escape the scrupulous judgments of another.

But Allelujah, indeed for as long as he had been dubbed Allelujah, had not known such a sense of aloneness. Allelujah, even within the confines of his own thoughts, shared a consciousness with something that was not fully him. For as long as he'd known of a facility made of stark white and harsh sterility, a facility that contained a girl that could reasonably be overlooked as an in situ expansion of the facility itself for her apparent lack of life and vibrancy and anything else that would have been indicative of a living being, a facility that had taken away his name replaced it with an animalistic brutality that scared even himself, Allelujah had known that his mind was occupied by two tenants.

He'd long since forgotten the peace of being able to think in private. Even the most passing of thoughts that flowed through his subconscious did not escape thorough examination by this other, snatched out of the stream of sensory information, shouted through a megaphone and magnified under a lens until what was supposed to be a whisper became the screaming of jet engines ringing inside his skull. Eventually, Allelujah had become scared to think of anything at all for a begrudging fear of input of the other. And at the same time, he'd become accustomed to the constant scrutiny and forgot what it was to live without it.

No thought belonged solely to him anymore. No action that he took could be assumed to be for the benefit of himself alone. He didn't know how to impose his own will, but he still recognized when he was carrying out the desires of the other.

"You're an idiot, Allelujah," it would taunt at the smallest inkling of compassion for someone that the other didn't find worthy. "You don't know how to survive," it would chide when it witnessed their body putting the needs of another before themselves. "You were built for a purpose that you can't even carry out. You're a failure of a weapon, Allelujah. Pull the trigger, Allelujah!"

Allelujah, for as much of his life that he could remember, had not been alone, and so the silence in his own mind was the first thing he noticed upon waking.

The second thing Allelujah noticed was a rigid object down his throat. He felt his esophagus constrict around the intrusive object when he tried to breathe, tried to swallow, but failing. His throat clicked and he made a strangled noise so small that even he wasn't sure he'd heard it. The end he could feel jutting out of his mouth he couldn't see. He tried inhaling through his nose this time; no luck.

Allelujah wanted to move a hand to his face to pull the thing choking him clear of his throat, but he found his hands to be unresponsive. What was happening? He got the sense that he had just lost the better part of a day, maybe more, but he couldn't determine why, and his primal drive for survival which normally would have been demanding his compliance in waking up and breathing was ghostly quiet.

"I couldn't orient myself in his midbrain."

A voice. An external one. It sounded distant and distorted, like it was coming to him through water.

It was best, he decided, to open his eyes and take in his surroundings. To assess the situation visually. Allelujah was built to go longer than the average human without oxygen, but not much longer. If the other half of his psyche wouldn't - or couldn't - help him out, he'd observed enough of his other half's reflexes through the years to know how to help himself.

He blinked once, twice. A cold, fluorescent light met him, and a greasy sludge streaked over his field of vision blurred and dissipated the light until all he could see was a bluish glow. He blinked again several times, strongly, and the streaks ebbed and flowed with his eyelids until finally receding into his periphery. The right field of his vision was a blind spot.

 _"Is my eye gone?"_ Allelujah thought, directing his silent question to the bare bulbs that loomed overhead, washing him in an unforgivingly bright bath. It provided no reply.

His eye, normally grey but now appearing blue and electric in its frame of ragged red petechiae, flicked toward the blind spot. No, he could feel its neighbor moving in perfect tandem, and yet all he could see was the side of his own nose and, just beyond that, blackness.

 _"Am I blind?"_ Allelujah asked again, this time begging a response not from the light fixture but from the still silent other.

The right side was his side. Allelujah had never been sure how it worked, but he knew that the left was his own side, and the right side was territory of the other. Were the two occurrences - the unilateral blindness and the silence from his normally noisy codependent - related?

"His basal ganglia are a mess."

The external voice again. This time, Allelujah gathered that it was a man's voice. The words meant nothing to him. It was as if his brain was asleep. Unresponsive. His chest lurched and he remembered that he had not breathed yet. He was running out of time. The one eye that still seemed to be in working order was now flooding with tears, blurring what remaining vision he had. He willed, ordered his hand to move this time, but it's refusal continued. He was choking.

"I'd like to get my hands on a copy of his medical records from the Human Research Institute if such a thing exists. I have a suspicion that he may have the types of disordered neurobehavioral predispositions we see in patients with hyperkinesia. It might even explain why he was so malleable to the idea of terrorism."

A deep gurgling sound rumbled out from somewhere between Allelujah's chest and stomach, and with it a gush of something viscous. Saliva and mucus and bile. There was no room for it to come up to his mouth, and so it pressed uncomfortably in the deepest part of his throat.

Black static was beginning to creep into the edges of his remaining vision like a sinister mold.

"Sir, I think he's awake." Allelujah barely recognized in the fading mess of consciousness around him that this voice was much younger and softer than the other. Two people in the room.

His vision was gone. His hearing was going.

"…'s breathing...s own ."

The rush of his own blood in his ears deafened him.

"Let's get… Fifty-Seven, you need … out on thr… One… three!"

He should have taken over by now. He should have taken charge of survival. He should have demanded that Allelujah not let their body die.

 _"Hallelujah?"_

The hard thing down Allelujah's throat was being yanked out. Through the narrow opening in his tunnel vision, he could just make out a tube. Medical, probably to help him breathe at a time when he couldn't do so on his own, but now that he could, serving only as a hindrance. The moment it cleared his mouth and drug strings of the sticky fluids out with it, he inhaled deep and wheezing, and fell into a fit of body-wracking coughs.

As soon as the oxygen returned to his brain, he gasped and his lopsided vision and hearing came back riding a burst of adrenaline, although his limbs continued to refuse to cooperate. It was clear now that he was in some sort of medical facility. The plexiglass cradle of a life support berth sat off to the side, the lid opened and streaked with blood that looked days old. Two men clad in blue scrubs and white coats peered down at him over papery masks.

As his body calmed down from the ordeal, Allelujah looked to his left. His veins greedily slurped a cloudy colorless liquid through a needle inserted in his arm. The clear tube that delivered the liquid tethered him to the wall behind him where a dozen monitors beeped and produced numbers and percentages that must have reflected his clinical data. He looked straight ahead at his toes peeking out from under a thin, plasticky sheet that crumpled at every slight twitch of his head. He could feel the cold, hard metal of a surgical table pressing into his back and wondered, looking at his bare feet, if he was naked. Without being able to feel much of his body lower than his waist, he couldn't be sure. He turned his head to the right to compensate for his blind spot. His right arm was half falling off the edge of the table, numb just like the other, but just where his wrist eclipsed the edge, Allelujah could make out the silvery glint of a handcuff.

He gulped thickly.

A hand wrapped in latex was suddenly on his face, turning his head and forcing him to look straight up at the ceiling. One of the people in the room - the older - hovered over him with a pen-sized light. Allelujah recoiled when the beam flashed directly across his pupil.

"Do you know where you are?" the doctor asked, and for the first time, Allelujah noted that the language he used was Russian.

It had been years since he'd last used it, and the sounds had grown bulky on his tongue, but Allelujah replied, "Da." Yes. "Prison." His voice was gravelly. Barely audible. It hurt to speak.

The light passed over his eye again, and the doctor studied him for a moment.

"What is your name?"

Was there any point in lying? In keeping, or at least trying to keep a secret that was probably already known? If they had taken him from his Gundam - if they had captured the machine itself, they had access to more than enough data.

"Allelujah Haptism," he replied.

"Are you a member of Celestial Being?"

Allelujah paused. Hallelujah should have been telling him what to do by now. He was actively inviting him to front, and Hallelujah never passed up such a rare opportunity. "Yes."

"Are you or have you ever been known by the alias Super Human Test Subject E-0057?"

Allelujah winced. "Yes." He sounded ashamed. Hallelujah wouldn't have.

"Language centers are intact," the younger man noted. Allelujah let his head loll to the side just enough to see the young man who had positioned himself in his blind spot. Based on the differences in their clothing, this was a surgeon and his assistant or intern or apprentice - Allelujah wasn't sure of the terminology. The young assistant was making note of something in a compact tablet, looking up just long enough to stare at the wall of monitors detailing Allelujah's biological functions.

"His pupil is responsive," the surgeon added. Allelujah's attention and gaze were drawn back to him. "Petechial hemorrhaging is consistent with concussive head trauma. I'm going to unpack and check the injured eye."

The sensation of tape and bandages being pulled away from his face gave Allelujah the explanation he needed as to why his vision had been impaired. The relief he felt that he had not lost his eye was short lived, however, as the searing pain of having the apparently injured eye forced open took command of his attention. He whimpered as the doctor shined the light across both his eyes, back and forth, left to right and then right to left.

"Stop," he whimpered.

"Pupils are equal."

The elder doctor's hands were suddenly gone, leaving stinging tears in their wake. Allelujah squeezed his eyes shut to block out the light but this, too, provided a source of pain. He opted to let both eyes stay lazily half-lidded, blocking out as much light as he could without tensing up the tiny muscles and causing more pain. A throbbing was beginning to work its way throughout his head.

"You're a lucky man," the doctor announced. Allelujah took quick stock of the situation and decided that he could not agree. He was in captivity by the Human Reform League - again. He was now vulnerable to being a pincushion full of needles and scalpels - again. And this time, he was not an innocent child who at least some of the doctors would pity and show mercy. He was a terrorist. A mass-murderer. He was guilty and the Human Reform League knew it. He'd killed their own.

And where was Hallelujah?

"Our soldiers just barely pulled you out of that cockpit alive. You sustained a head trauma that caused a brain bleed." Through the grog of what Allelujah assumed must have been an anesthetic and his own unfamiliarity with the language, he picked through the words that were foreign to him. "We performed what is known as a craniotomy." Kraniotomiya. Allelujah didn't know that one. "You've been in a medically-induced coma for three days."

"Am I okay?" he asked, unable to produce more than a crackling whisper.

It was the assistant who interjected, "We won't know if you sustained any permanent… deficiencies." His training must have compelled him to deliver such devastating news in a sensitive way even to someone as despicable as the murderer lying before him. It was a habit. "Not until we're able to perform a more comprehensive exam."

"But you're awake," the surgeon replied in a tone that suggested being awake was more than Allelujah deserved. Allelujah agreed, knowing that Hallelujah did not.

"Paralyze?" Allelujah sounded out. _Paralizovat'._ He knew it was the wrong conjugation of the word, but he couldn't find the correct one in his vocabulary. Maybe Hallelujah would have known. No one was helping him survive.

"No. You're on a paralytic drug, but you're not paralyzed."

"It hurts," he acknowledged. "Shouldn't I… not feel anything with the medicine?"

"The injuries you've experienced are grave. Were you a normal human, you would have died." Allelujah met the doctor's stern gaze and felt the loathing behind it. Here was a man sworn to an oath to heal and do no harm now faced with a patient who had not shown so much thought for his countrymen. Maybe even his friends. Maybe even his family. "Take comfort in that."

The digital chirp of a pager sounded out from the assistant's side of the room. "The sergeant would like to begin his interrogation. He's going to send the Lieutenant."

"Tell her that the prisoner's in Post-Op 2 and is still being weaned off his anesthetic. They're welcomed to come, but nothing he says will be legally admissible in court for at least the next thirty minutes."

Prisoner. Maybe Allelujah had grown too confident in himself. He'd become Icarus flying towards the sun. His Kyrios had been his wax wings; it made him feel invincible. He was Celestial Being. He was part of a divine objective, a plan that was so much bigger than himself or his comrades or any army on their world. He killed for the common good. He flew too close to the sun and crash landed in prison. Hallelujah had told him that it wouldn't happen to a super soldier, but Allelujah had believed it, so they were both to blame.

He would die in here.

"Hallelujah," he whispered aloud. There was no response. It wasn't surprising, but the fear was beginning to set in.

"I advise not speaking unless prompted to do so from now on," the surgeon mentioned, tugging off his gloves with a sharp snap. "Corporeal punishment in your state will only further delay recovery."

Allelujah watched as the two men left, following them with his gaze. The sliding doors whooshed shut behind them, and Allelujah was alone. Truly alone. The only sounds in the room were produced by the medical equipment beeping, hissing, and dripping, and the steady, barely audible hum of an air conditioner.

"Hallelujah." His voice echoed ever so slightly. The room was large and made of smooth synthetics and metals. He waited for the response. It had to be an effect of whatever drug he'd been administered. It was suppressing the part of his mind that housed the other entity.

"Hallelujah," he repeated after several moments, a little louder this time.

Hallelujah was still asleep, not aware of the peril. Had he been awake, he would have taken over and found a way out through brute force by now. But he was asleep. That was it.

Allelujah called for him.

"Hallelujah."

Nothing.

"Hallelujah."

Nothing still.

"Ha—"

"E-57."

Allelujah's heart, tired and strained as it was from blood loss and surgery and a cocktail of drugs, found the strength to lurch into his throat. He forgot the pain in his body and his eyes went wide. Fighting the chemicals in his blood, he even managed to work his unbound arm into a position that helped him prop himself up.

"Marie." The word was whimpered and pitiful. It came as a beg.

He looked down between his temporarily lame feet to the door through which the doctors had taken their leave. The slim figure of a woman too young to be in the olive drab fatigues she wore stared back at him. Her face was devoid of all emotion, save perhaps for some curiosity shown for the medical equipment.

Tears brimmed in his eyes as his body reacted negatively to the flurry of motion. His brain, concussed and reeling, was begging him to close his eyes, to look away from the artificial light gleaming off the soldier's platinum hair and pale skin, glinting off the insignia decorating the uniforms of the officers on either side of her, but Allelujah was in control of the brain, not Hallelujah, and so self-preservation was not prioritized.

"Marie!" His voice came out this time like the cry of a wounded animal, both a growl and a screech simultaneously. Some part of him found the strength to pitch himself upright into a tilted sitting position, his right side forced into a hunch due to the handcuff's grip on his arm. A sharp burst of pain ripped through his head, traveling down his neck and back like electricity. His vision blurred, then doubled, and he curled in on himself reflexively.

But just for a moment.

He leaned left, tugging against the chain and feeling the edge of the table bite into his forearm where the two intersected. His shoulder protested once he'd twisted himself as far as he could manage, and the world pitched and skewed around him as the desperate drumming of his heart in his head begged him to lie down, threatening him with unconsciousness if he would not comply.

"Marie!" He shrieked again. "You're here!" His lips were pulled back tight and his teeth were bared. It was meant to be a smile, but at that moment, lost in a slurry of pain and despair and overwhelming joy, Allelujah wasn't quite sure if he was managing a smile. He felt the connective tissues in his right shoulder reaching their stress point as he pulled in futile effort against the bonds keeping him immobilized. He could imagine the bowstrings of a violin being wound too tight, snapping and coiling away one at a time as they were cranked tighter and tighter. The raw skin under the vice of the handcuff was now crushed and beginning to ooze lymph tinged pink with blood. It didn't matter; he would heal, and heal faster than most. He wanted, needed to get closer to her.

The soldiers flanking the soldier, his _Marie_ , leveled their rifles and ordered him to lie back.

"Stand down," the lieutenant ordered, and her subordinates obeyed wordlessly. "He's clearly not a threat."

She was so close. There was no mistaking her essence, the gentle tug of her quantum brainwaves inviting him to meld his consciousness with hers. She must have felt it, too.

"They said you were the super soldier," the woman offered coldly. Her face betrayed no emotion she might have been feeling. "You were my cohort in the Institute."

"You remember me, right M—"

"I needed to know," she interrupted, "what one of my failed brethren looked like. I needed to know so that I may never allow myself to become like you."

Allelujah opened his mouth but couldn't find words. He felt sick. He was hot and cold at the same time. He was going to pass out.

"You're pathetic. Look at you - you're no super soldier. You're nothing." She looked at him with so much disgust. Like a feral animal plagued with mange she'd be happier seeing put down. She didn't recognize Allelujah, and the man she saw, she hated.

The lieutenant, unfazed, ordered her subordinates, "Put him in four point restraints before he dislocates that arm. I don't want him causing trouble for the researchers."

"No!" he protested, not at the soldiers approaching him, but at the sight of the young woman turning her back on him. She was leaving. _She was leaving_. He was going to be alone. He was straining against his restraints and putting every ounce of energy he had into trying to contact her, and his brain was protesting, insisting it was injured and not capable of doing such things, but it was in vain because she was leaving.

"Hallelujah, wake up! I need to use the quantum brainwaves!" But Hallelujah did not respond, and Marie was gone.

"Marie!" he called after her, half sobbing. The pain in his head exploded and he doubled forward against the force of the soldiers pushing him back.

It was okay, he decided, if he was going to die. He was already alone.

...

A/N: I had really had meant to get this up sooner for the 10th anniversary of the 00 original airing, but I kind of lost my rough draft for a while. Oops.

Set during the time skip, immediately after Operation Fallen Angels. I always imagined the worst part of Allelujah's imprisonment was not having Hallelujah around and learning to deal with a true lack of communication for four years. And it was a part that started early.


End file.
